


Hyperion

by NorroenDyrd



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Ancient History, Black City (Dragon Age), Darkspawn, Gen, Non-Canon Inquisitor (Dragon Age), Talking Darkspawn, Tevinter Imperium
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-18 10:21:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17579045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NorroenDyrd/pseuds/NorroenDyrd
Summary: Perhaps the most unusual Herald of Andraste that Thedas could have ever seen: once a bumbling acolyte at the ancient Temple of Dumat, now a very confused but well-meaning sentient darkspawn.





	Hyperion

His name is Hyperion Amladaris. His father has always joked that he really does put the 'hyper' in everything. Hyper-excited; hyper-curious; hyper-eager to please - whether he is a gap-toothed child, looking up at his parents from a curtain of bouncy black locks, breath held in a chicken-thin throat in anticipation of approval... Or a gangly twenty-something, tripping over his brand-new raven robes, which pinch ever so slightly under his arms, and looking searchingly into the harsh, unreadable face of the head priest of Dumat, the conductor of the great Choir of Silence, as he studies his letters of recommendation.

 

'Very well,' the priest says at length, tossing the parchment scrolls back into Hyperion's hands with a swift, limp gesture, as if he were disposing of dirty laundry.

 

'You may enter the standard trial. Maybe - maybe - you will make it and become an acolyte'.

 

Hyperion, who has failed to catch the letters, starts up from his scrambling across the polished floor - jet-black with streaks of frosty silver - and gasps,

 

'Oh, thank you, Uncle Sethius! Thank you!'

 

'Do not call me that,' says the priest, turning away.

 

Hyperion makes a small noise, which he locks as well as he can behind his teeth. That's... that's fair. He is not worthy.

 

***

 

He is still not worthy years later. Not worthy of being called anything other than 'boy' - even though he is now a bit past thirty; not worthy of having his beaming greetings responded to; and certainly not worthy of being taken along on the glorious, daring, once-in-an-era mission to greet the gods in person, in the heart of the Fade.

 

Not worthy, as far as the priest of Dumat is concerned - but the priest of Urthemiel, Dragon of Beauty, is kinder. His eyes are velvet-soft, and his touch is reassuringly gentle. He allows Hyperion to join them, at the tail of their long procession decked in black and gold. So... So he is there.

 

He is there at the climax of the journey across the swelling emerald waves, which can - and do - at any time swap places with the vaulted sky filled with shards of floating rock. He is there when the ghostly halls ring with emptiness, and shadows come flooding in; he is there when the priest of Dumat falls to his knees, choking on a screech of anger, and digs his fingers, his claws, into the dead ash that covers the ground, shuddering and wheezing and... boiling into another form.

 

'Uncle Sethius?' he cries desperately, stumbling towards him even as his own chest boils and bubbles, an oily mass of shadows welling up inside just as it wells up all around them, rushing in from every corner.

 

'Uncle Sethius? Are you all right?'

 

'Don't... Call me that!' the priest spits, lashing out with a blast of raw red magic, which ripples with all shades of gushing, steaming, congealing blood, like the hardened growths that push out of his jaw, stretching out his skin in their wake.

 

There is a pain - a shattering thrust from Hyperion's eye sockets to the nape of his neck - and all goes black.

 

***

 

When he awakens, he is still there. Alone in the darkness. The others - the grand magisters and their retinue - must have perished or fled without him, not finding him worthy of being rescued. Not that it matters. Nothing matters, except always moving, moving, moving, lest the shadows catch up with him.

 

He does not know how much time has passed. He does not know if the skeletal, elongated limbs and mangled face that he sees sometimes, when looking at himself in bodies of green water - with depth always changing from shallow puddles to bottomless ocean, nauseatingly so - are real or the result of a spirits coiling inside his skull. He does not know how he has managed to survive; he does not remember what eating and sleeping feel like. There is no clarity in his world any more, not like when he was Hyperion the 'boy', hyper-eager to please.

 

He nigh on abandoned hope that the clarity would ever return - indeed, he is not quite certain that the very... the very notion of hope is not another illusion woven by the coiling, hissing viper nest in his brain cavity. But it does return to him, after an eternity of wandering; the poisonous vapours roll back, tainting his mind no more, and he sees a tall, glowing fissure, splitting the air above one of those chunks of endlessly drifting rock.

 

Reaching forward tremulously, he walks through... And finds himself in a crammed room, surrounded by stunned men and women in blue-and-silver armour, who somehow all seem so small.

 

Suspended in the air above their heads, is a priestess of some sort, though the cut and colour of her ceremonial robes does not call forth the name of any god he used to worship... in a life beyond the haze. She is writhing, tortured, in the thorny binds of red magic that link her to a hulking figure that looks all too similar to Hyperion's new reflection. With wiry hands ending in blackened claws, and pallid flesh spread over spikes of bloody crimson. The figure starts, and drops the thrumming carved orb it has been holding - which pushes Hyperion instinctively to scramble for it on the floor like for a discarded letter.

 

'I... I've got this, Uncle Sethius!' he stutters, unaware of how the words have leapt off his tongue.

 

'Don't call me that!' the figure rumbles threateningly... And all fades from memory.

 


End file.
